Source: Friday Times
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The news on 5 December 2012 read like this: Pakistan’s Supreme Court has constituted a judicial commission to probe the 2007 Lal Masjid operation in Islamabad in 2007 – a government crackdown on a controversial pro-Taliban mosque in the capital which ended in a bloody eight-day siege killing at least 58 Pakistani troops and seminary students.
Lal Masjid facts have been overwhelmed by politics. The operation marked the beginning of the end of the Musharraf regime. It is said that he brought himself down by first allowing the operation against Lal Masjid and then dismissing the Supreme Court of Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry. The PMLQ, through which he was ruling, wanted no part of the operation because of their deep rightwing conviction not to take on the clerics. As they began distancing themselves from it, his political platform began to slip from under him
During my visit to Pakistan in Nov 2012, I also visited the Red Mosque but only from outside. When I tried to take pictures, a man came running to me and said; “it is forbidden to take pictures of this mosque”. When I argued that it was non-sense that I cannot take pictures of a public building, he went away.
To those who blamed President Musharaf for ordering the extremists to vacate the premises and stop its zealot Imam brothers to take laws into their own hands, he was criticised by political parties and now Supreme Court wants a Commission to investigate the event.
I have a simple question: What would any government do if a mosque, an organisation, a town or part of a country refuses to abide by the constitution and refuses to accept the law of the land? Would it be acceptable behaviour?
Just because the mosque housed religious students and Imams does not mean that they have the right to mutiny against the state. There have been many cases in the west, especially USA when FBI flushed out by force such movements. The same goes for mutinies against the state. No country can allow a state within a state and especially those who flaunt the law publically and misuse the religion for their own political agenda.